North America’s pioneering comics publisher celebrates its quarter-century with new and rare archival comics; essays from Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, and more

Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels is an eight hundred-page thank-you letter to the cartoonists whose steadfast belief in a Canadian micro-publisher never wavered. In 1989, a prescient Chris Oliveros created D+Q with a simple mandate to publish the world’s best cartoonists. Thanks to his taste-making visual acumen and the support of over fifty cartoonists from the past two decades, D+Q has grown from an annual stapled anthology into one of the world's leading graphic novel publishers.

D+Q: 25 is the rare chance to witness a literary movement in progress; how a group of dedicated artists and their publisher changed the future of a century-old medium.

Praise for Drawn & Quarterly

This giant tome collects [an array] of creative riches... rounded out by essays from established prose authors such as Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, and Lemony Snicket, celebrating the company and its groundbreaking talent. It's a history of one great company, but this volume also works as an essential guide to the development of alternative comics in all their glory.

Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-five years of contemporary comics, cartooning, and graphic novels [is] an exuberantly entertaining anthology of short comics (many of them new) by almost all of the artists who have worked with the company over the years, from Kate Beaton’s sly, brash gag strips about history and literature to Geneviève Castrée’s tender sequence of self-portraits with blankets under which she’s rested.

A new full-colour anthology, staggering in its range and scope at nearly 800 pages, makes plain what many have long known: the company founded in 1990 by Montreal comics aficionado Chris Oliveros... is one of the finest independent literary publishers in the world, having established a brand that makes it not only influential in the golden age of graphic literature and non-superhero comics, but synonymous.

If you were looking for a primer for contemporary comic strips this is the perfect place to start, branching out from the autobiographical strips of Seth and Chester Brown to Marc Bell's queasy E-numbered surrealism and Genevieve Castree's gorgeous, intricate Blankets Are Always Sleeping, a strip that riffs on a repeated single-panel design full of duvets and anxiety, to the primary coloured simplicity of Anouk Ricard's comic... There is so much out there and so much of it is good.